


Agita

by Rhyolight



Series: Containers for the Things Contained [1]
Category: Castle
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 18:22:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhyolight/pseuds/Rhyolight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castle and Beckett  have to deal with the fallout from near death once AGAIN. Or do they? They've managed perfectly well not to so far.</p><p>After Linchpin; contains spoilers up to and including Season 4:16</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Sophia. Rick couldn't get her off his mind.

At the time, which was sometime after Meredith and before Gina - he could remember Alexis coming up to about few inches below his hip, so, maybe four years oldish? - at the time, he had been mystified by her. Entranced, too, of course. He was easily entranced by a beautiful woman who acted like an adult. Rick was pretending to be one himself in those days, so when they talked about themselves - not very much, he realized now - he minimized the chaotic childhood and dwelt on the responsible parent. An impression easily reinforced by his need to get home in time for Alexis's bedtime most nights.

Most nights.

Rick raised his eyes from the glass in front of him. Not the first glass of the evening. The team, as Rick thought of them, were debriefing as much as they could under the circumstances. Beckett had shown them her car, which now had a few tasty gadgets the NYPD would never have paid for. Rick had asked if it had rockets or a cloaking device, but she said he'd have to wait and see. Ryan had left for home. Javi and Lanie sat across from him (it was a round table in a quiet corner). Beckett was powdering her nose, and in her momentary absence, Esposito asked the difficult question. "What was with you and the spy?"

That was something not classified, anyway. When Rick had time alone with the ex-Marine he knew he would spill the whole story, but both Lanie and Beckett had a distressing by-the-book tendency that inhibited reasonable need-to-know gossip. And it was a bar, not a secure location one bit.

"I wanted to write that kind of thriller, and I needed something more recent than rereading LeCarré. So I decided to ask at the agency, like a normal person. I'd had a couple books published already, so they took me seriously, and they wanted people to like them, so they gave me... this beautiful woman. I shadowed her for a couple of days while she did unclassified stuff. Computer work, like you do. Following the money."

"That can't have been very interesting," Lanie commented.

"It wasn't, but that was the point. I mean, you guys have spoiled me, bodies around every corner -"

"Hey, New York is safer now than it's been in years -" Javi loved his city; Rick nodded at him.

"This was way before 911, you know, and it wasn't all that safe. But CIA has always been quieter, checking out the credentials of businessmen, the trainers on international basketball teams..." Rick shook his head. "It was dull, but that was okay. I write fiction, and I think the general air of... implausibility some critics found in Derrick Storm - stop laughing - reassured them."

"So how did you become an item?" Lanie asked.

"I don't know if we were ever an item, Page 6 wasn't interested in me then and she was-"

"You know that's not what I meant."

"Well. After the first book came out, and her office was okay with it, I took her to dinner a couple of times, and we kept in touch. I'd known her about a year, well into the next book -"

"Is that how you keep count?" Beckett asked, sitting down at the table. The atmosphere changed. Rick could see his current muse was still not happy.

"Yes, actually. I can remember what was going on in my life when I look at certain scenes. Anyway, she was having setbacks at work, arguments with colleagues - now I wonder whether she was with us or against us. She never seemed like an enemy national."

"That was the point," Lanie said. "I know you're feeling surprised -"

"UNDERSTATEMENT-"

"But the people she worked with must be in worse shape."

"Very true," Rick agreed. "The Spy Who Loved Me, she never was. I never was, either, but we had a few wonderful weekends. Don't look at me like that," he said to Beckett.

"I was not looking at you Like That."

All three of them forbore to tell Kate she certainly was.

'Let's say, for the record, we know you were both consenting adults," said Lanie.

"We were. Once she used me for an undercover mission - SHUT UP! I meant she wanted to be at a resort watching a guy, and she invited me along for camouflage. It was fun. "

"I can't imagine you helping anyone maintain a low profile," Beckett said.

"I was a lot poorer then. And besides, being with a buffoon made her harder to suspect . She spent most of the night there on the phone." He shrugged. "And the rest of night was very pleasant. I liked her a lot, but she was always clear that was as far as it was going. Don't blame me for being attracted to competent women." Rick batted his eyelids at Lanie, who smiled.

"That's not what she told me," Beckett said. It sounded like it took her some effort. "She said things about 'longing.' And how after a lot of longing, you - did something about it, and then it was never the same."

Rick blinked. "News to me," he said. "'Longing,' on her part?"

Beckett shrugged. "She just said 'longing.' As though it had been mutual."

Rick looked her full in the face, and she looked back. Big improvement over earlier, when either the excitement after the takedown or her irritation over not being able to talk about it had left him feeling uneasy. "Beckett, I am... familiar with longing, and it's not a word I'd ever use about her and me."

"Really."

"Really, yes." She knew his tells. He hoped she could recognize his truth.

After a moment Beckett sipped at her drink. "Then I guess she lied to me."

"She was lying to everyone else, why not?" asked Lanie.

"Nice chance to mess with the good guys' heads," agreed Javier. "She already had your case, why not your-"

"My what?"

"Your goat," Javi said quickly. "She could get it. You muses are all about competition, everyone knows that."

Lanie regarded him dubiously. "And you'd know that how?"

"I read Muse Weekly at the gym all the time. The down'n'dirty on everybody's inspiration, who's up, who's off, who's dating a vampire. I'm not just a Guns and Ammo guy."

They laughed. "You have to show me that sometime," Rick said.

"Why, are you in the market?"

"Only if Beckett fires me," Rick answered.

"Not today," Kate told them. "I should go home, things to do tomorrow."

"You could take a day off," Lanie said. "As your medical advisor -"

"I am taking the day off," Kate said. "But I have non-work things to do."

 

Like going to visit Dr. Kovalic, her remarkably handsome almost certainly gay therapist. Not that it mattered, therapists being off-limits and Kate not being in the market. It was relaxing not to have to flirt or be flirted with.

"You nearly drowned?"

"Somebody pushed my car into the Hudson River, while Castle and I were in it."

"Kate, I see a lot of cops, and you're not anywhere near the stupidest, but you've had more near-death experiences in the last year or so than the rest of them put together."

"I know. And from now on, I'm keeping a crowbar in the front seat." And maybe a razor blade.

"It's damned hard to try to help you with old trauma when you keep making new ones."

"I got out!"

"And Castle?"

"Of course. He got the window broken and helped me with the seat belt. And held my hair while we threw up river water."

"It sounds like a close call."

"It was."

"And you're just fine with that?"

Kate thought about the other close call, the moment when she thought Sophia would shoot them both. Thought about Sophia falling to the floor instead. Jumping the would-be assassin was nothing in comparison.

"You have to talk about what you're thinking, Kate."

"Some of it's classified."

"Tell me what you can."

So she told him. "He wanted to kill that cute little kid. I can't believe it," she said when she was done. "I don't think Castle's dealt with that yet, or he'd have tried to strangle the shooter."

"Maybe Castle was dealing with his old lover trying to kill him and getting killed herself."

"He seems okay."

"To speak unprofessionally, you're all nuts," said her usually very staid therapist. "Or maybe professionally. You didn't like her. You feel guilty about being glad she's dead?'

Kate was used to this. Part of the process, it seemed, was the therapist saying the things that were absolutely unsayable. "I'm not actually glad; I'd have liked to see her interrogated. She was a bitch and she used me and my department to try to carry out her assassination, and I'm glad she won't be doing that anymore."

"And she's out of Castle's picture."

They had discussed Castle until Kate could hardly stand it, more than once. She wanted Kovalic to treat him the way she did: a quirky but useful member of her team. Kovalic wanted her to treat Castle the way her heart wanted to, or areas lower than that. "Esposito says muses are very jealous. "

"What do you say?"

"I think everyone's very jealous, actually. Remember how Castle was about that other writer?"

"So it's all about writers and their muses, not men and women?"

Kate decided not to answer that for awhile.

"So, what would you miss if you had died this time?" It was becoming a familiar question. Both of them laughed a little because Kate refused to scream. She knew Kovalic wished she would cry a little more often when he asked that.

"Spring in Central Park. The Nikki Heat movie, if it ever gets made."

"And what if you lived and Castle had drowned?"

Knife in her guts.

"I thought these sessions were about me."

"What would YOU miss if Castle had died, in same car?"

Alexis. And Castle's mother. Facing them.

"Not, 'who would you have to deal with if he died?' What would you miss?"

"A lot," Kate said finally.

"It's interesting. I'm seeing a lot of emotion about that, but nothing when you think about dying yourself."

"Well, I'd be dead, and believe me, that's got to be easier than surviving someone else."

"People die all the time. At least four people on this case alone. "

"And there's a lot of paperwork?"

"That's cold."

"They weren't people I worked with. If I care about people as a cop, I can't look at all of them the same way. No matter how much they are all children of God or whatever."

"No one, probably not even God, would expect you to. So how do you feel about Castle nearly dying this time? Were there things you wished you had said?" Silence.

"We were in the middle of a case," Kate said at last. "And now..."

"And now you have time." More silence. "Do you have reason to think he won't want to hear that you care about him so very much?"

Now, now, she was tearing up. "No. Last week - the Tuesday -"

"Valentine's Day?"

"There was a heart in my espresso foam. He watched me look at it. I didn't say anything." She stopped talking.

Kovalic pushed the box of Kleenex across to her.

"I hate Valentine's Day," she said when she could talk again.

"It's a plot. We in the mental health field made it up to increase business. Do you want some water?"

Kate shook her head. "Is our time up for today yet?"

"Almost. Can you admit you wish you could say thank you for the 'clouds in your coffee'?"

"'I'm so vain'... Maybe. Yes. I could buy him a fancy latte, I guess."

"Kate, it's okay, it's perfectly normal to love someone you nearly die with. On a regular basis."

"I don't want it to just be 'We're alive, let's celebrate.'" It would be a start, she thought. If it wasn't right, we could both back out pretty gently. After a minute she came back to seeing her therapist watching her think. Annoying, but his job. She shrugged.

"Someone in a different line of work from you might not think that was such a small thing to celebrate."

Kate rolled her eyes at him and kovalic continued. "Think about what you do want. And try not to get almost killed again before our next appointment, please? It interferes with the therapeutic process and gives me agita."


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate has a therapist. Rick has to face some one far more frightening.

Beckett had the day off. Rick stayed home, his arms aching from the inoculations Lanie had pumped into both of them. The Hudson was sort of clean, she had explained, but there were precautions, and it had been how long? since his last tetanus shot?

He didn't want to be a baby but he felt under the weather, and Nikki Heat was a welcome change, for once, from real life at the police station. Except that he kept thinking about Clara Strike, and what his feisty, cliché-ridden CIA agent would have said about Sophia Turner. Clara had been scathing enough back in the day, when her creator had allowed her to make remarks about writers of thrillers, men who slept with women who had more important jobs and then felt let-down when the women wandered out of their lives... . Clara was no Nikki, but she had had some common sense. She wouldn't like an upper-level CIA agent ready to sell out world peace. He wondered very briefly whether it should become true that Clara had been a hostile sleeper agent all along. Fan reaction might rival the death of Derrick Storm. Or he might lose all the back-list sales, still doing nicely, thank you.

And he knew he didn't want his readers to have that sick, vertiginous incredulity he had felt. Though they would not have the same experience - a fictional character turning out to be quite a different fictional character - as Rick had had. A woman from his past showing up as lovely as ever, giving him all kinds of come-hither, and then minutes later offering to shoot him and Beckett. Or at least Beckett. Probably him as well. Maybe just to wound and impede them. Sure.

(The writer inside him briefly sketched a scene with Beckett on the floor and Sophia suggesting they flee the apocalypse together. Nah.) Rick had surprised himself by staying with Sophia's body as Beckett and Other-Agent-Guy, Danberg, ran off to save the day. He couldn't remember going into that kind of shock before; was it the habit of affection for an old flame, or the really confusing remark about his father? What kind of mind-games was she playing in those final moments? Was there any point to lying to someone you were about to kill? Even if you were an evil overlord?

With a discipline that would have surprised his publisher, Rick wrote for three and a half hours, apparently getting his characters out of one terrible fix while setting them up for another. Word count achieved! Including part of what he owed from the previous week! Time for lunch (well past, in fact). The refrigerator yielded a bounty of leftovers, though someone had finished off the spaghetti carbonara. He wondered how Rook would like a dip in the Hudson. He wondered whether he really should revisit the death of Derrick Storm, as Gina was urging, or just let the man live in graphic novels, as Rick 's authorial integrity argued. Temporary death was strictly for the Marvel universe. Or zombies. Zombie Derrick Storm. Vampire Derrick Storm. Being fought by Clara and Nikki together. Oh, the cognitive dissonance. "He's not the man you loved, Clara. He's become... a monster."

Or not. He didn't want them in the same room again, even if the room was just in his twisted mind or a double-page drawing. It had been too uncomfortable in real life. It was never comfortable when Beckett got that look. Considering that she had not said anything crushing lately about Jameson Rook and Nikki Heat, she had been remarkably scathing about previous muses and previous ... liaisons.

Probably it was worse when the previous muse also had a higher security clearance than you did.

Alexis came home. She looked tired. "Hey babe."

"Hi, Dad."

"No internship today?" Hard to ask that lightly enough.

"No murders for you?" Wow, okay. Alexis wasn't being light at all.

"Day off. Writing."

"Day off. Trying to be a teenager." She grimaced. "I couldn't take shopping seriously enough."

"Are you all right?"

"No, not really. Is there any more corned beef?"

"Yes, can I make you a sandwich?" Food before feelings: a principle in their home.

Alexis shrugged. "Thanks. Mustard."

Seeing her bite into the French bread made Rick less worried, but his daughter was still uncharacteristically silent. "So. Shopping?"

"Prom was better when it mattered."

Rick nodded. "No one these days you care about going with."

"The whole thing. I know getting out of high school, getting a job, being in the real world, was supposed to make you more mature but I didn't think it would make me feel so OLD. "

"You've been too grown up for some of your schoolmates for a long time."

"This time I was out with people I really like, and I couldn't just say, 'You know it really doesn't matter what you wear to the stupid prom.' But that's how I felt. Janie asked if the internship was making me morbid and I was sorry I'd told anyone about it."

"I'm surprised you did." Considering you didn't even tell YOUR FATHER. "Were they freaked out out because of the bodies?" Were you?

"I didn't tell them I was seeing bodies, I just said crime scenes. And I haven't actually been there for an autopsy yet. Have you seen one?"

"A couple, not with Lanie, though. It's okay if they don't turn out to be your style."

Alexis gave him a withering glance. "I might really like forensic medicine, Dad. Although I did tell her I wasn't sure if I wanted the first one I saw to be someone I knew. I don't mind thin-sectioning kidneys, but I think cutting into someone I knew while they were alive would be different."

"She's not- not anyone from this case-?"

"No, she said the CIA wanted to look after its own. Then we made ugly remarks about what kind of special protocol you'd have to do on someone who was murdered with an umbrella that shot poison darts. That really happened, she said."

"In England, yeah."

Alexis continued to eat. She was tidy about it, definitely from her mother's genes, Rick thought. The 'being able to eat while discussing thin-sectioning kidneys,' yeah, probably not from Meredith's side. She drank a glass of water, got more lettuce from the fridge, looked at him hard.

"It wasn't the bodies she had to talk me through."

"I didn't know she had to talk you through anything, what -?"

"Of course you didn't hear about that, she respects me."

"I -"

"I know you do, you just also see me as your little girl. It's all right, Dad, it's part of the package."

"Well, for me it is, yes. I know you're growing up but sometimes -"

"And that's okay," she said, actually smiling at him. But it was a watery kind of smile. "And sometimes I really am your little girl, and I guess it's all right that you slept with someone in 1990. " She watched him squirm and smiled, better this time. "Probably more than one, and I hope you used -"

"ALEXIS!" Rick could feel himself blushing, which was only right because Alexis was, too.

"Just following the 'responsible' script, Daddy."

"Well, I guess I should be happy about that." He waited, knowing his daughter would get to it soon, whatever IT was.

"What Dr. Parrish had to talk me through was watching them fish your car out of the water. I was okay with the poor dead guy - not that we had him for long, but the car... you and Detective Beckett were in that car when someone pushed it into the river. And I knew you weren't any more, you were both okay. But it was down there deep, it took a long time to get it pulled out and I guess Dr. Parrish noticed when I had to go throw up. I knew I wasn't supposed to hurl on the crime scene."

"The 'responsible script,' " Rick said, a little faintly.

"So then the CIA came and took the poor dead guy away from the police, and Dr. Parrish bought me hot cocoa and we cried all over the Starbucks."

"Lanie cried-?"

"Just a little, sort of in solidarity. I'm okay now." She didn't look like it.

"I'm so sorry," Rick said.

Alexis shrugged. "I know. You didn't mean to."

"No, but -"

"But what?" The high school girl in front of him did one of her blink-of-an-eye morphs into a strangely familiar woman he had never seen before. Beautiful. In pain. Mostly unreachable. "I know you're not going to quit doing murders, sorry, not that way, I mean - you could get killed by a bus tomorrow, and at least you're doing something that matters when you're with Detective Beckett. It's just... I know everybody dies, I know you don't have to be old, or on drugs, or sick... I just don't want it to be you." She left the table and hugged him.

Castle held his daughter and ached inside. He could hear himself wanting to begin to say See, I told you this internship was a terrible idea, but he knew it was dumb. It floated through his mind that Beckett had been barely a year older than Alexis was now when her mother was killed. The thought of Alexis in that kind of pain made his own stomach roil.

And Alexis didn't know about the spy in the garage with the gun, who had once been in his arms herself. Much different kind of intimacy. Rick knew, if he had ever not known, how minor his feelings for Sophia had been. She had died, and he had been stunned, but Alexis lived and was well and wept on his chest and he felt as bad as if he had died and was already putting his daughter through this.

"I'm still here," he said. He kissed Alexis's forehead, and held her some more, and thought how much bigger she was since she had last cried on him like this, taller and stronger than her mother now, too.

Whereupon the doorbell sounded, and they jumped. "Answer it," Alexis said, heading for the paper towels.

Rick hit the button and said "Hello?"

"It's Kate," said Beckett's voice. "I have coffee, can I drop by or are you busy?"

Rick looked at his daughter. "Of course she can," Alexis mouthed at him, regardless that Beckett couldn't hear her.

"I um, sure, yes," said Rick to the little grille. He was at sea, still rocked by his daughter's love and grief, amazed to hear Beckett's voice - he could number the times she had 'dropped by' on one hand. Alexis put their plates in the dishwasher and answered the door.

"Hey, Alexis - what's the matter?" he could hear Beckett while he was still glued to the kitchen floor. He stumbled toward the door, to see Alexis carefully setting a takeout bag on the credenza before sweeping Beckett into a hug.

Why can she do that and not me? Rick thought.

"Just don't you die, either," said Alexis, not quite sobbing again.

"I don't think so. Alexis -?"

"Just talking with my father about cars in the Hudson." She grabbed her father's arm and pulled him into the hug too. Rick felt Beckett tense, then relax as they patted Alexis on the back. The younger woman took a deep breath. "Sorry. Having mortality issues."

"My therapist is trying to get me to have some," Kate told her, surprising all three of them. "I think you're ahead of the game."


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another session with Kate's therapist.

"So then what happened?" Kovalic asked her.

"Nothing."

"It's unprofessional of me. But I want to swear."

"Go ahead?"

"How could 'nothing' happen?"

"Well. Alexis hugged everyone for awhile, and then she let go and we all moved apart —"

"Jumped apart, or eased apart?"

"Eased, if that's a word. We're not startled teenagers." Kate knew him well enough not to need to see the skeptical part — honestly, did she have to live in a world where everyone was Groucho Marx? — and continued…

"I should probably leave you guys, I was just—"

"No," said the voices of both Castles, Alexis from up the stairs and Rick from beside her. "I have a Skype study date in ten minutes," Alexis finished.

"'Date?'" asked her father automatically.

"Study-date, with Annika. Physics exam tomorrow."

"So we couldn't all watch a movie?"

"No, Dad. I have a life."

"Hey, I doubled my word count today."

"Which means you're only what, fifteen kilo-words behind now? You can watch a movie, though. Maybe Kate could stay for dinner?"

"Umm, I think so," said the detective. "If it's all right with your father." She turned to Rick.

"Of course it's all right," he said. "It's great. Do you mind if we don't go out, I was going to ask you but —" he made exaggerated gestures at the stairs. "Kinda like to be with her tonight."

"I can't go out with you, I have a previous engagement here," Kate told him. "At least the other woman is someone worthwhile."

"Your other woman, or mine?"

"Yours, I guess."

"I have always been told it was possible to share daughters, but it hasn't been easy. This is getting really twisted. It's so great you're here, Beckett." Rick's hand came halfway to her arm and stopped. But his face was full of delight. —

 

["So you reached out and took his hand?"

"No. Why are you making a note?"

"Just go on."]

 

"I'm having a little trouble tracking. I just realized Alexis is having someone special over for dinner and I need to start cooking."

"I thought she had a study date — oh. How do you live like this?"

"ADD is more than a lifestyle, or didn't you know? Only we don't have any food, because I live like an animal. With a lot of menus. What's it like out today?"

"Really nice."

"Let's walk to the grocery store."

So they did. It was not the cheapest place in town. Castle wore a backpack, filled it with Asian vegetables, talked to strangers. When they were back outside his building he checked his watch and looked sad.

"Too cold for the park really, anyway. And I'm getting hungry."

When they reached the apartment they found Martha and two of her students energetically discussing Sondheim and breaking onto song around the piano. Castle closed the partition into the kitchen with an eye roll, which lowered the volume enough to talk. "Is a Castle's kitchen not his own?"

"Live music by Broadway stars while you cook?"

"Off-Broadway. Off, off, off. Have I ever told you about the time she was in some kind of funk and had to play 'Man of la Mancha' for it seemed like five days? I nearly gutted the piano. But it's actually hers."

"Can I do anything?"

He gave her onions, cutting board, knife, a place to work. "I usually put the news on about this time. But you're here. If it was important they'd call you."

"Way too true."

"So I'll give you the rest of your day off. What was it like, being a patrol cop? Did you ever feel you were not on call?"

"Research, Castle?"

"I'm allowed to research while I hydrate the rice noodles. Besides, how do you know what I'm researching? Maybe you'll actually cut into the Beckett onion…."

 

Kovalic said, "So that was it? You had dinner, and then you went home. You didn't stay for the movie?"

"The mayor called. Called Castle. It was awkward, and I was tired, so I got Alexis to let me out and I went home."

"Alexis loves you very much, you know. What's that like?" Kate didn't answer for a minute. Kovalic smiled. "You're not arguing with that?"

"No. I guess not."

"Being loved by someone else's teenager is an honor."

"Yes. Yes, I think it is. She's in a terrible position, I mean, she's definitely Castle's kid, but I know Lanie sees her as a kind of grown-up without much experience — and if I knew her without Castle I'd see that too. But when she's with him it's … being that age is hard. You want to leave the nest, you don't ever want to leave the nest, completely arbitrary line when you finish school. And she's so good it must be terrible. I was never that good."

"So you don't see perfect common-sense behavior as necessarily a good thing?"

"I certainly didn't then. She must know some bad boys who smell like wet flannel and clove cigarettes, but she doesn't seem to want to date them. I hope she goes to a college where there are some people on her level… I'm a cop, so I shouldn't even think she should loosen up… Heaven knows I don't want to hear about her riding police horses naked through the campus, but maybe a little beer. On the other hand, I don't want to have to sponge her father up off the floor if the dean calls."

"Speaking of deans, how do you feel about homework?" Kovalic watched his client transform from what he considered 'KB Normal' — a poised, somewhat overclocked, young established woman of power, to 'sulky teen' — he needed to find a word other than "homework," to 'defensive-but-you'll-never-know tightly-wound dancer. Martial artist. Something with fabulous footwork.'

"What kind of homework?"

"We talked about keeping a journal."

"I don't have time."

"Well, you don't choose to have time, but it might get your wall down faster without adding more sessions here. Looking at it like that make it any better?"

"I'm not sixteen any more, writing my self-absorbed diary."

"Why do you think you have to be sixteen to know yourself better?Why is that self-absorbed? What else are you here for, except to figure you what makes you tick, so when you go tock instead you have some idea what's happening?" He gave her a few moments. "What's happening now?"

"I don't like being alone with myself — I just keep seeing all the ways I screw up — bad enough coming here."

"It's much more fun working with you than working with narcissists, but you could use some of that. Look, here's an idea — write about a day and pretend, instead of you that's screwing up, pretend it's Alexis."

The look on her face said this was possible. But distasteful.

"Or, " he continued, "set a time limit— absolutely no longer than half an hour, on any account, and write about drowning. About last week. Then come in and tell me what that was like."

"Do I have to read it to you?"

"You can if you want."

"I could email it to you."

"No. Use a pen and paper, not even a typewriter. And no research on Wikipedia. Think of this as a different way to work on your wall. By the way, is that still a good metaphor? Do you still feel like your mother's death is a wall between you and really being alive?"

One of the reasons he really liked Kate was that she thought hard and she tried to tell the truth. He listened as she did it.

"Her death… it's still like a watershed in time. Nothing was the same after that. I went through the motions. Sometimes I still feel like I'm going through the motions and only pretending to be an adult. But they let me have a gun. And I've heard enough about 'impostor syndrome,' I don't really have that. Since I shot her gunman… it was like opening a door and all kinds of noise came out. You know, like that story about playing the trumpet outside in below-zero weather, and no noise coming out? Then you take it home and put it near the fire and suddenly it's all BLATT, at once? It felt like I could really solve what happened and then it felt like I never would, and then… before I got shot…before Roy died, it felt like … the end of Sergeant Pepper." She paused.

"If you were old enough to use that, you'd be dating yourself."

"It's still a really good album."

"Sorry, you were saying?"

"A lot of this year I've felt like there needs to be another shoe to drop. Another big chord. But I was thinking about how you're right, all the near-death experiences make it hard to work on anything else. I think that's why I liked the three months not talking to anybody about anything."

"You carried that too far," Kovalic said. "At the risk of giving my opinion. You didn't talk to yourself about anything, and, you didn't talk to any of your friends. Most of us— if we're lucky enough to have good friends, some might be family — know ourselves at least partly through what our friends tell us. I hope you know what a risk that was."

"Every so often I catch hell from Lanie again. Next time I would call her."

"And Castle?"

Kate did her 'looking-for-an-exit' tell.

"Spell it out for me, Kate."

"….Maybe I feel like I still haven't talked to him," she said.

"Another shoe?'

"Yeah. Yes, now you put it like that."

"A shoe you are holding, in fact."

"I started to the other day." She only rarely made excuses for herself. "I chickened out. Alexis was there, Castle was all kind of — dazzled? He was dealing with her feelings. I was dealing with her feelings. It was easier to deal with her feelings."

"I wish you would go talk to your inner 18-year old, Kate. Get a notebook. Go talk to her, go see her in jail or wherever you think she is. She is the other side of your wall, you know, the other side of your watershed. Go be with her."

On the other side of town, Alexis wondered why there was a cup of cold fancy coffee in a takeout cup in a bag on the sideboard near the door. She took the lid off to empty the cup and recycle the lid. The foam on a latte doesn't last very long, and nothing was left to see of the heart.


End file.
